Classical Hollywood and where to watch it (in the UK).

Film  We're constantly being warned now about the death of physical media and it's true that a swathe of new films are no longer receiving timely shiny disc releases if at all.  MARVEL have already announced that none of their Disney+ shows are going to disc (which means our MCU collections will be forever incomplete).  But it's fine, we're told, streaming services have such depth of content it won't matter.

Except, that's not true, at least in the UK and especially for those of us who're interested in Hollywood cinema made in the classical era during the first wave of vertical integration, when the "content stream" went from sound stage to studio owned theatres rather than streaming services because what are Disney+, Paramount+ and Netflix if not that?

As you'll see below from the survey I've made, the back catalogue or archive of the major studios during the studio era is all but absent from the major subscription streaming services apart from the most popular titles.  There isn't a streaming equivalent of the 20th Century Fox Studio Classics collection and the Criterion Channel hasn't launched here.

Which isn't to say there aren't ways of seeing these films.  As I advertise every day on Twitter, Cinema Paradiso has in its collection every dvd or blu-ray released in this country going right back to the early noughties (you can sign up here and get a free month to try it out).  Pretty much the whole of Cary Grant's career is available for example.

If you just want to watch the occasional thing you can also rent most titles through Amazon Video although at up to £3.50 a pop that could get expensive if you're on a Ginger Rogers binge, for example.  There are also nefarious uploads to YouTube or the Internet Archive which in some cases is the only way of getting hold of some material in the UK.

British cinema on the other hand is pretty well served by boutique UK streamers.  Between Britbox, the BFI Player and TPTV Encore.  Network on Air is also slowly coming on stream.  Between them there's probably a couple of hundred titles which is remarkable in comparison to what's elsewhere.  Between the BFI Player and MUBI, European cinema is also impressively covered.

But in the main, no matter who has the rights to this stuff, none of the UK streaming services with the exception of Disney are interested in exploiting pre-60s US film.  Perhaps they're afraid of cannibalising the dvd back listings.  If only films were treated in the same way as Spotify and there was a single place you could go to watch everything in film history for a single subscription price.

Columbia Pictures

In deep archive terms in the UK, Columbia Pictures doesn't exist.  At time of writing has two films from the studio era, Amazon Prime has another two and All4 has a couple for catch-up purposes.  Plex has a smattering of westerns.

20th Century Fox

Disney don't seem to have any interest in exploiting the Fox catalogue before the 1970s and even then only films "of note".  The only two studio area films on Disney+ are An Affair to Remember and Journey to the Centre of the Earth and they're both from the late 50s.

MGM

Nothing.  Much like Fox, when Amazon took control of MGM's assets it seemed as though uploading MGM's back catalogue would be one of the priorities, especially from the studio system era, but nope.

Paramount

Before the UK launch of Paramount+ I was salivating at the sheer amount of classic Hollywood material available on the US version.  But sadly none of that has transferred over.  Yet.  As it stands we find the contents of the Audrey Hepburn boxed set which always seems to be perpetually on sale at Fopp and a couple of westerns.  There's also the weirdness of seeing Miramax films in the mix here instead of Disney+, the parent company Viacom having bought the company recently but that's a discussion for another time.

RKO Radio Pictures

Back in the mid-50s, the BBC signed an incredible deal which means they have the rights to show a core set about about a hundred RKO titles in perpetuity.  This still seems to be in abeyance and so we find forty-odd movies on the BBC iPlayer.  Plex GB has another dozen.

Samuel Goldwyn Productions

Due to the slightly chaotic approach to how films appear on its service it's impossible to know if this is due to rights or an uploader, but thirty-eight films from the Sam Goldwyn Company are on Amazon Prime with prints of varying quality.  Compared to the output list on Wikipedia, its by no means everything there's a fair spread across the United Artists and RKO distribution eras.

United Artists

Twenty films on Amazon Prime.  Sixteen on Plex GB.  Four on Pluto GB.  Although this is one of the messier studios to investigate because they were mainly a distributor for productions from major studios and minors.  Often "United Artists" films were actually produced by a much smaller company then branded as such.  The Netflix of their day.

Universal Pictures

Nope.  Even assets like the monsters sequence.

Walt Disney Studios

Disney+ of course.  Although the studio's entire history isn't quite available, all of the important releases are, across animated and live action.  The standard.

Warner Brothers

Nothing from the studio era on any service.  Perhaps that will change when HBO Max launches in (checks notes) 2025.

Babylon 5 Looks Like a Big Pile of Shit.

 

TV Just before Christmas, between lockdowns, I was lucky enough to visit a charity shop or two including the Barnardos on Smithdown Road. Imagine my amazement on finding, all alone on the shelf, the complete Babylon 5 DVD boxed set for just £25. Knowing full well that a new lockdown was imminent, I decided that this was to be my new bingeing project, at least a few months worth. I duly bought and almost broke my back carrying it home, this heavy beast with the equivalent of seven seasons of television inside.

Then, between Christmas and New Year I began watching it. The pilot episode is notoriously patchy, as so often pilot episodes are, although I've been a fan of Tamlyn Tomita, who plays deputy command on the station, since The Joy Luck Club which she made the same year. But there was enough for me, despite her recasting, to want to settle in and see the rest of the series, for which I've always had fond memories since its original Channel 4 broadcast.

Then during episode one, I began to see a problem I'd already had wind of but wasn't quite prepared for - how ugly it actually looks. Like much mid-90s TV, Babylon 5 was originally broadcast in the 4:3 aspect ratio, but like FRIENDS and other WB shows at the time, had its live action sequences shot on film in 16:9 in an attempt to keep them future proof, which definitely worked on FRIENDS, whose HD transfers are gorgeous.

Sadly, to save money, the CGI sequence were created in 4:3 which was fine at the time since the TV audience wouldn't know different, but ran counter to the point of shooting the rest of it on the assumption that future generation might want to have a more cinematic experience. When it came time to release the series on DVD, the studio was keen to release it in widescreen but oh god, the CGI, the CGI.

As this old Engadget post explains, the decision was made to remaster the 16:9 footage and then to zoom and crop the CGI sequences to fit the frame even during live action sequences. Which means whenever there's any CGI on screen, the image noticeably loses what already weak definition it has and the composition becomes distractingly cramped.

The effect is to pull the viewer out of the story every time a computer generated shot occurs, either in the space sequences which are often rendered incoherent or the live action scenes when on occasion there'll be a cut to some mad close-up in the middle of a sequence breaking up the rhythm of the piece. Even worse are the moment when there's a crossfade from a CGI sequence to a fully live action and the latter remains zoomed in.

On a couple of episodes, the CGI sequences haven't even been cropped. They've simply been stretched to fill the 16:9 space even in those transitions making the whole thing almost unwatchable. Quite why they didn't bother on those occasions isn't clear, although its true that they tend to be episodes which less CGI than others so they could simply have decided to use their meagre budget elsewhere.

This decade old page takes a much more detailed look at just how awful these transfers look also pointing out how a decent upscaling result could have been achieved and also that the NTSC and PAL (Region One and Region Two) transfers also differ in numerous subtle ways in terms of framing. The author becomes increasingly both cross and resigned to the horrors across the length of the article.

The upshot of all this is I'm finding it incredibly difficult to watch Babylon 5 in this form.  The first season is reputationally a bit of a slog, but there's plenty in there to enjoy but every time there's a CGI shot I'm pulled out of the story.  Plus the colour timing is incredibly drab even though my TV is collaborated to make Technicolor pop.  

As the Engadget article explains, there are craftspeople willing and able to set about creating commercial HD masters of the series, and that there might even be excellent 4:3 transfers which could be spruced up for release ala Star Trek.  There are some "remastered" SD versions doing the rounds on streaming services, which do look better but apparently have new problems like missing scenes.

It's incredibly frustrating to think that the WB is willing to spaff millions towards a mediocre director to create a bloated version of a superhero film failure in order to placate a group of 4Chan refugees, but can't find the resources to create dynamite restorations of one of the seminal science fiction shows of the 90s.  Doctor Who fans have been incredibly lucky.

Now I'm left wondering if I can carry on watching Babylon 5 in this compromised form.  Perhaps in the past when watching films in the correct aspect ratio was a dream and I frankly didn't even know what the term meant I would have been more forgiving and wouldn't have noticed.  But it's difficult to forget all of that when you've become habitually laser focused on such things.

Perhaps I'll just watch FRIENDS again.

A Thousand Observations on Film Art.

Film The utterly superb, Observations on film art, by film theorists Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell has reached its thousandth post. Authors of Film Art: An Introduction, the book which helped shepherd me through university and especially my dissertation, they began writing digitally in order to provide an adjunct to the limited page limit of the book. But it also allowed them to apply the principles to new releases.  The blog has since gone on to encompass all aspects of film culture, with festival reviews and offer annual reviews of films released a century ago.

"Why couldn't it be that day?"

Film 'The world is in a state of turmoil': why time-loop movies resonate in 2020. Short piece from The Guardian about how time loop movies resonate in the current situation, which talks the screenwriters and directors of all the greats, like Groundhog Day, Happy Death Day and See You Tomorrow. When I first brought an Alexa, I set it to wake me up with I've Got You Babe. That stopped being funny relatively quickly.

Ebi Obegbuna's Wind Verses Polygamy.

TV Earl Cameron and a lost play. John Wyver writes extensively about the lost recording of writer Ebi Obegbuna's play Wind Verses Polygamy.  I wonder at what point our cultural attitude to television changed from it being thought of as being just as ephemeral as theatre because it was rarely repeated and being disgusted that such items are no longer available in the archive.  When the BBC began its retention policy?  When the first domestic VHS recorders were produced?  The first commercial video tapes making some of this material available and therefore leading us to wonder what could be made available?

Thandie Newton on everything.

Film In Conversation: Thandie Newton.  Astonishingly frank interview in which she describes what was tantamount to abuse on the set of Crash, being fucked around by the racist producer of Rogue and bow she nearly had the Lucy Liu role in Charlie's Angels but the producers wanted her to be more stereo-typically "African-American".

Making the Most of the Streaming Services.

Film Now that the country is entering lock down and London is starting to resemble the opening episode of Doctor Who's Invasion of the Dinosaurs, it's becoming mighty clear that we're all going to be clinging to our usual comfortainment which probably includes films. 

Plenty of us are subscribed to one or two streaming services and I've been wondering just how widespread some of the "hacks" I've picked up over the years are.  So I thought I'd put them up here just in case.  Note the following is with the UK in mind but there tend to be versions of these things abroad too.

Here's everything off the top of my head right now.  If there's anything else, expect a series of follow-up posts.

Just Watch

Just Watch is a search engine for streaming services so that you can find out where a film is available and at what price or if it's on a subscription service. 

The site is available worldwide and covers all of the major and some of the minor services including Netflix, Amazon, NowTV, iPlayer (and the other terrestrials), Disney+ and Mubi.  Here's the page for When Harry Met Sally.

But you can also filter by service which means you can get a preview of what's available before signing up.  Here's Disney+.  Here's Shudder.  There are similar services available, but I've found Just Watch to be the most user friendly.

New On ...

Streaming services are tragically bobbins at letting its users know what films have been added to their catalogue each day.  Netflix has added a preview area but that doesn't over everything.

Thanks be to @maft who has worked some magic on various API and produced websites and Twitter feeds which update daily with the whatever has been added to Amazon Prime, Netflix and NowTV.

Here's a link to the Netflix page.

Here is a link to NowTV.

Amazon Prime's a different basin of sea monkeys.  Unlike other services as well as licensed material it also allows some user uploads, so a lot of rubbish is added each day.  Maft has coded around that to get rid of most of the shite, but has created two pages just in case.

The gold should be here.

The junk should be here.

But as you can see, depending on how the material is added to Amazon's database it could end up on either of them.  Of the three, Amazon's is always the more interesting with some really oddball documentaries and archival material.

Finally, you can also look at the various services by year.  The 1993 page on Netflix is incredible.

Vodzilla

Vodzilla's coming soon pages offer a preview of what's due to be uploaded the following month on the main services.  Sometimes its a bit threadbare and doesn't cover everything, but it's a useful indicator in case there's something which you have on your dvd-by-post list and would prefer to stream instead.

MUBI

When it's working, MUBI has a live stream page which runs the films which are currently in their catalogue randomly throughout the day, if you're in the mood to experiment.  There isn't a schedule so you may end up watching something which is half way through though.

If you're staff or student at a university or college, you can also get MUBI for free.

Visit https://mubi.com/filmstudent or https://mubi.com/filmteacher, enter your details and you should get an account with a four or five year expiry date.

Film Films From Reputable Sources

Bookmark those genre pages, guys.  All of these also have apps on most if not all streaming sticks and smart TVs.

BBC iPlayer - this page sorts the items with latest broadcasts first, most of which are available for between a week or month.  Scroll further down and there's a few Sony Pictures films from the turn of the century which have a much longer expiry period, should you want to revisit the AJ Tomb Raiders.

All4 - generally stuff which has been recently broadcast which can include material which hasn't received a UK theatrical release.

My5 - an unmitigated shitshow to be honest with, thanks to tie-up with PlutoTV some full blooded theatrical releases mixed with TV movies and other dross.  Incredibly this currently include's Hal Hartley's Fay Grimm, which is so rare, it's barely seen the outside of the film festival circuit.

Google Play - A bit empty at the moment, but worth keeping an eye on.

BFI Player - a massive collection of archival material from the BFI, far too much to even consider describing here, from silents, shorts to feature films.  Most of it has to be searched but you could keep an eye on the collection pages.  Here's one for musicals.  This Google search provides a haphazard list of the others.

National Film Board of Canada - see above but from the Canadian film industry.  The website has recently updated and is much more user friendly.  Does include plenty of feature films, but some are only available in Canada.

The Fault In My Stars.

Film For the past few years I've been keeping a Letterboxd account, which due to the volume of films I watch (usually every night after dinner) has been invaluable as an aid memoir. Recently I wasn't sure which of the films I'd seen about Operation Anthropoid (a mission to assassinate some prominent Nazis), Anthropoid or The Man With The Iron Heart. Turns out it's both, but images and elements from the two have merged in my memory to such a degree I assumed that it all must have been from one or the other.

Today's entries are For Sama, Waad Al-Kateab's Bafta award winning memoir of the siege of Aleppo and John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection, Julien Faraut's meditation on film making and the tennis player's erratic behaviour.  Both are incredible in their own way, but like similar film review websites Letterboxd forces the user to apply a star-rating, a process which is fraught with anomalies in this polarized society because each user will have their own measure as to what constitutes a five star film down the one star.

To check in with the professionals, Empire Magazine explain how their star ratings are measured at the front of their review section:

✮✮✮✮✮ Excellent
✮✮✮✮ Good
✮✮✮ Okay
✮✮ Poor
✮ Awful

Which lacks a certain nuance.  This has changed over the years.  A 2007 issue suggests:

✮✮✮✮✮ Classic
✮✮✮✮ Excellent
✮✮✮ Good
✮✮ Fair
✮ Tragic

As you can see, Classic has been removed and the rest of the rating descriptions have been given an upgrade (Fair and Okay meaning arguably pretty much the same thing).  This rather makes a mess of their online review archive because older ✮✮✮ films are deemed Good but viewed through a contemporary lens they're now only Okay.

None of which has been of much help to me, and neither has this short Wikipedia article about the star ratings used by other publications, with the later Roger Ebert utilizing a 0-star to 4-star rating and Leonard Maltin sticking between 1-4 which always looks a bit inconsistent on film posters when other publications have ✮✮✮✮✮ which carries an identical weight.  As with Letterboxd users there isn't a standard rule, which doesn't really matter for the masterpieces but puts the only ok movie in a fraught position.

Here is the scale I've worked towards:

✮✮✮✮✮
Amazing.  Would watch again and again and recommend to everyone.  Will probably buy it.

✮✮✮✮
Amazing.  Don't need to watch it again soon but would still recommend to everyone.

✮✮✮
It's fine.  Could have been amazing but has a fatal flaw in there somewhere which turned me against it.

✮✮
Shrug.

✮
Shite.

Here are the films I've watched so far this year and my ratings from Letterboxd:

✮✮✮✮✮
Ready or Not
Hustlers
Sunset
Booksmart
John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum

✮✮✮✮
For Sama
John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection
Toy Story 4
Varda by Agnès
Little Monsters
Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)
Dora and the Lost City of Gold
Anna and the Apocalypse
Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
Late Night
Long Shot
Miss Americana
Bait
Pain and Glory
Instant Family
Animals
The King
Earthquake Bird
The Two Popes
Mrs Patterson
Fast Color

✮✮✮
Mystify: Michael Hutchence
To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You
Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound
Ad Astra
Crawl
Anna
The Man Who Killed Don Quixote
Hail Stan?

✮✮
The Hustle
Brightburn

As you can see the scale forces me to be more generous with my ratings than professional reviewers. No one star reviews here. For the record my one-star films since joining Letterboxd are:

Alice In Wonderland (1933)
Song of the South
The Image Book
Winchester
Fan4stic
Kidnap

There are twenty-five two-star reviews, the most controversial of which is probably The Irishman which for all of its technical marvels I found incredibly tedious.  Casino is still the only good Scorsese directed gangster film.

Except I've forced myself into these boxes.  For the most part people tend to have two ratings for films, just as they have for everything:

Liked it.

Didn't like it.

There'll be a certain amount of squirrelly searching for a middle ground. People will talk about the things they liked in The Rise of Skywalker or some other offering from a favourite franchise but ultimately you either liked it or you didn't. I didn't and gave it ✮✮✮ matching Empire's assessment (which must have been difficult after dedicating four or five covers to its release over the past year or so).

Which is why a thumbs up or down rating, while lacking in nuance is probably the most honest of all the potential ratings systems.  It's just a pity that services like Netflix tend to use it as a measure of taste rather than criticism.  Just because I don't like The Rise of Skywalker doesn't mean I don't still love The Last Jedi, one of the best films of the last decade.  But that's a discussion for another time.

Bergman: A Year in the Life is on BBC Four on Saturday.

Film As it says in the post title, the documentary, Bergman: A Year in the Life, is on BBC Four on Saturday at 9pm.  Here's a link to the documentary's BBC programme page, where it'll be available after broadcast.

It'll be followed at 10:55 by The Seventh Seal one of my top five favourite films of all time.  Here's where The Seventh Seal's programme page. This is a rare television broadcast.  Judging by a BBC Genome search, it was last on the BBC in 1995 as part of a wider Ingmar Bergman season, although FilmFour broadcast it once in 2009 and three times in 2011.

The eighty or so best films of the 21st century and some others.

Film Best films of a thing listicles aren't usually something to become enraged by. People have opinions, I have opinions those opinions don't usually match.

Yesterday NowTV set me up with a month's subscription to reality TV streaming service Hayu and even if just scrolling through the content turns me straight into Max von Sydow in Hannah and Her Sisters, I know there are people who find great comfort in watching rich people being silly and who am I to argue?  Who cares what a snob like me thinks?

But, friends, The Guardian's 100 best films of the 21st century is bullshit.

Oh no, hold on, I can't argue with the film in the top slot, even if Peter Bradshaw's longer analysis misses what makes it truly great, that as David Bordwell's analysis shows, it changes the language of cinema in a way which we're still seeing the effects of.

Plus it finds room for Stories We Tell and Gravity and 13th and Margaret (although it doesn't specify the three hour version, which is the true masterpiece).

The rest of the list, though, is filled with some absolute howlers.

Topper most: 

Inception isn't included.

The Guardianistas have The Dark Knight as their Christopher Nolan choice which is fine even if having it as the only one comic book movie when that is the prevailing and most prominent film genre of the past twenty years is not.  Take you pick of Marvel films.  They'll all do.

Except this list also includes Borat, which hasn't aged well and now looks like a "borderline" racist folly, the existentialist bore Anomalisa as the Charlie Kaufmann choice when Synecdoche, New York exists (as does everything Ardmann's released) and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (which admittedly I haven't seen but can't be a better Tarantino than any of the others he's released in the past two decades).

But not including Inception here, is like ignoring The Matrix when listing 90s films.

As I proposed back in my original feverish review (nine years ago) (I'm old and so is this blog), Inception is "a film that has all the excitement of a typical summer action blockbuster but with all the intelligence and weight and beauty of a Tarkovsky film". 

It demonstrates that the audience is crying out for films which ask weighty questions and has great thematic heft as well as spectacle, not mention its visionary mix of practical and digital set design notably in the corridor sequence.

There are other howlers.  Ted rather than Bridesmaids, no Chalet Girl, a preponderance of miserablist films in general (is Nebraska really better than Hail Caesar?) but leaving out Inception shows a certain lack of appreciation for film history.  Fools.

The Two Popes.

Film This looks fascinating. Two incredible actors in bespoke roles, an important moment in the spiritual history of the planet and despite my cynicism about religion and especially this particular church, it's straight onto my watchlist. Judging by the trailer, for all its formerly cinematic aims, there's a version of this film shot on multi-camera video in TC1 at BBC Television Centre in the 1980s.

The Macra Does Exist.

TV Although I didn't enjoy everything about animated version of Doctor Who's The Macra Terror, I understood that such things as the scene omissions and the way the scenes often stray wildly from the telesnaps were as a result of the production schedule and budget.

This brilliant making of explains just how difficult it is to create these animations, featuring short essays by most of the key creatives.

 Here's Charles Norton on thinking through how the project would even work:

"... when Paul first started talking about tackling another of these projects around Christmas 2017, we all had certain reservations. A project of this scale really needed a full year of production time or as close to it as reasonably possible. It ideally needed to have the resources to cover an all-under-one-roof team of character animators. We needed dedicated production and studio managers, so that the director could really just concentrate on actually directing and not everything else. This is far closer to how such shows are run in the States. The way Warner Brothers make their straight-to-DVD Batman animations, for instance. The idea there is to sub-contract out much of the heavy-lifting 'grunt-work' of character animation, leaving your core creative team to concentrate primarily on story direction and design."

In any case, it's better than whatever was going on in the Reign of Terror animation.

The editing of Apollo 11.

Film Fascinating interview with Todd Douglas Miller, the director of new film Apollo 11, which goes into some detail about the editing process:

" The first order of business was working with Robert [Pearlman] as our independent chief historian, Stephen Slater, who was our archive producer, and putting together a nine day version of the film. We really want you to look at every single second of the mission which spanned nine days—eight days and some change. All told, it spanned nine days—to look at every available still image—whether it was 16mm 35mm large format, TV broadcasts, and links, we wanted to see all of it. Of course, all the audio, too. That was a real tedious way to do it but we need to know exactly what was all out there not only to educate ourselves but also we had so much new material. We needed to see where things lined up and where the holes were and what we could do with those."

Apollo mission fans like me are clearly look at that and salivating at the idea of a nine day long version of the film version in which the action occurs in something akin to real time. Though of course to an extent it will be quite tedious with plenty of repetition. But this methodology has worked wonders. The great strength of the theatrical release (which I saw today) is that it shows the familiar event with unfamiliar footage at unusual angles.

Production Design. It's Complicated.

Film Short piece in The Guardian about Nancy Meyer's comments at a Producer's Guild of America meeting about the double standards her films have endured at the keyboard fingers of predominantly male critics, especially about production design:

"I don’t love when a journalist or critic will pick up on that aspect [of the film’s design], because they’re missing why it works. It’s never done to male directors who make gorgeous movies, or where the leads live in a gorgeous house."

Damn right. Films like Grand Budapest with their overt production design do tend to be recognised at awards more than as might be the case in a Nancy Myers film, even though they both offer similarly complex design challenges.

In the case of even It's Complicated, a designer has to decide exactly why a character lives in this house, has decorated it in this way, all the fixtures and fittings, from wall art to dishes and how they express that character.

Frequently films do have a generic interior thrown together on the quick and it strikes the wrong note undermining the suspension of disbelief. That's never the case with Nancy Meyers films and too often this is held against her.  God forbid that she'd want to control the whole image.

 Meyers is superb at what she does and the fact that she's only made one film in the past fifteen years is an utter shame.  And before you start, The Holiday is a classic. Yes, it is.

The few good things about BoRhap: The Movie.

Film Bohemain Rhapsody is not a good film. The reasons have been rehearsed elsewhere and indeed the key weakness, the editing, for which the usually otherwise very good John Ottman received an Oscar, are covered in this video essay:



BoRhap's Oscar buzz remains a mystery. There were better performances this year and certainly better editing. But I pause at the Sound Editing and Sound Mixing. Ironically, A Quiet Place feels like the more worthy winner, but I appreciate why this might have been chosen.

Much of the time, the prefered option with any musical biopic is to have the actor also do the singing, lipsincing is rarely convincing, especially when a voice is so distinctive that if it emerges from another actor's mouth it just doesn't look right.

That's certainly true of BoRhap, but I can see why the members of the Academy thought the intergration of Freddy's voice into the footage deserved recognition.  Frequently, it appears in the background of scenes or in unexpected moments which feel spontaneous.

But the tour de force is the closing Live Aid sequence when Malek et al, helped by some extraordinary production design, recreate one of the most famous concerts in history, right down to Smith and Jones's introduction thrumbing in the background the band's stage entry.

The following video demonstrates the extent of the performance, directing (whoever that was)and sound technical achievements by comparing the film's version (with interpolations from a BD extra) and the original Live Aid footage. You could argue that the world didn't need a hi-definition remount of Live Aid in letterbox but one exists now and its mesmerising.



Admittedly, the sequence also reminds us of how the film's meta-editing choices fudge one of the film's narrative through lines.  One of the important moments earlier in the film is about the adoption of Radio Ga Ga as an anthem and how as well as showing Queen's collaboration it offers a chance for the audience to become involved.

Including that section of Live Aid as seen above would have provided the emotional apotheosis of that, but for some inexplicable reason we get Hammer to Fall instead, which is a fine song but doesn't have the same resonance within the film's narrative arc (such as it is).

But notice how Malek's imitation of Mercury is near perfect, down to gesture and facial expression almost the entire way through and how well synced they are throughout each song, from air punches to the business with the microphone stand.

Even if the actors playing the rest of the band aren't always in the "right" place on the stage, Malek is, almost to the inch.  Even the video's thumbnail shows the attention detail, right doan to how the singer holds his microphone.

Except of course, all this also does is to demonstrate just how magnetic a personality the real Freddie Mercury was on stage and so how much else in the film does a disservice to him and his story.  But I'll give them the Live Aid sequence, even if the wrong bits are in the film.

The resurgence of Indonesia’s movie industry.

Film Indonesia's filming and presentation industry is booming with new cinemas opening and local productions increasing. Bloomberg reports:

"A sign of the changing lifestyle is tucked away behind Cinema 21’s venerable art deco-style Metropole, which was built when Hollywood itself was going through a golden age. In a low, white building, part of the chain’s Premiere brand, wealthy Jakartans pay 100,000 rupiah ($7.07) each to view the latest blockbusters in cosy theaters that offer waiter service and big, padded armchairs that recline at the touch of a button."

Why does this matter?

Because if cinemas are to survive, presentation has to be improved. The seating and projection of films in the average UK multiplex is dreadful, especially considering the considerable price being charged. With the lowering windows between theatrical and digital releases, large screens simply aren't enough.

There's much to be learnt from the Indonesian model.

Regeneration of the Author.

Books Lindsay Ellis's latest video essay is about Barthe's Death of the Author and the relevance it has to some modern texts, especially John Green's The Fault In Our Stars. Barthe posited that one should only approach a text on the basis of what's in the text rather than the author's intent or any paratext, that such things are irrelevant.  As Lindsay points out that would be fine if we lived in a perfect world were every writer had the same opportunities and could reach the same public and be accepted writing about any subject matter, but that simply isn't the case.

She notably doesn't mention how this works in shared, multi-author universes in which no single voice controls the entire output.  You would think that spin-off fiction for the great franchises would demonstrate the death of the author in that it features a group of authors working towards a much larger grand narrative - except that isn't the case.  Back when I was reading Star Trek novels, I knew that something by Diane Duane or Peter David or The Reeves-Stevens would be different experiences, in terms of wordage, subject matter and view on the franchise.

It's also particularly true of Doctor Who, which is essentially an anthology series with a single protagonist (for the most part) and regular supporting characters.  Setting the RTD v Moffat v Chibbers comparisons to one side, even regular spin-off writers have a particular style.  Paul Magrs, Johnny Morris, Lawrence Miles, Steve Lyons, Jac Raynor and Eddie Robson among many others others all have different interests and I'd say that there are some writers whose work I always go out of my way to read or listen to no matter which era they're working on.

What was especially interesting was when authors who'd become synonymous with a particular era went on to write for the revival tie-ins.  Would a casual reader appreciate what Paul Magrs is doing in Sick Building or Lance Parkin in The Eyeless and how that compares to some of the more down the line, less experimental works?  I don't know.  But as Ellis shows in the video, its impossible to view a text in and of itself.  There will always be patterns, expectations and assumption on the part of the reader generated by their perception of the creator.

And we still don't know anything.

Film One of my favourite writers has died. I think most of us would be able to sort the books we've enjoyed onto three metaphoric boxes. Those which we'll read once then move on, those we like enough to keep on the shelf and return to now and then and those books which have a profound effect on who they are. William Goldman's Adventures in the Screen Trade is in the third category for me.  My love of movies can probably be traced backwards to reading that book.  My interest in film studies was founded in those pages which led to doing the MA a decade ago.  But most importantly my understanding that creativity and problem solving go hand in hand, that writing is most often about setting yourself a task and finding the most imaginative way of achieving it and also that you can take that approach with life in general.

It's a book more spoken about than read I suspect.  One of its key themes, "Nobody knows anything" is parroted a lot by people who rarely know the context. The full quotes is "Nobody knows anything. Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what's going to work. Every time out it's a guess—and, if you're lucky, an educated one."  In other words, nothing is a sure thing but you can certainly have a hunch.  More often than not, especially in the realm of blockbusters, those releasing pictures know that they either have a resilient classic on their hands which will stand the test of time or some piece of shit which they can make a fast buck on.  The makers of Black Panther had a hunch that it would do ok, if not necessarily the stellar numbers which ensued judging by the marketing campaign.  The makers of Fan4stic knew they has some prime horseshit and let it die.

Honestly you should read this book next.  The anecdotes are worth it and there are plenty in there which haven't still done the rounds as well as those which have, about the making of All The President's Men (the clashes with Redford, Berstein and Ephron) and Marathon Man ("My dear boy, why don't you just try acting?").  But there's also clear instructional material on writing screenplays, how to construct a narrative and how to deal with source material in adaptation, that whatever it is should be dealt with as raw material rather than some holy scripture.  That film is a different media to print and attempting to do a direct adaptation does a disservice to both.  The chapter on A Bridge Too Far alone is an incredible resource as Goldman explains how he chose the various stories and then set about working out how they'd be crosscut across the film, making the most of what was sure to be an incredibly starry cast.

His other books are all just as entertaining in varying degrees but I have a soft spot for his collected writing for the likes of Premiere Magazine about specific Oscar years in which he dissects the contenders, such as noticing that framing structure in Saving Private Ryan is utter nonsense because it's from Ryan's point of view which means the film ends with some of the key emotional threads unresolved.  I remember reading these on their original publication and thrilling at window they offered on how the needs of production impacts on the writing process and his sheer honesty.  His most recent film credits have been as a script doctor on a diverse range of projects and you can usually tell that there was a moment when everything fell into place and then the director began to ignore Goldman's advice.

Of all his films, All The President's Men is still my favourite.  As Screentrade explains, not everything which appears on screen is his but the overall structure and much of the dialogue survives.  His approach was to show the audience what they don't know.  For example, that there were two break-ins at the Watergate, the first successfully planted the listening devices and it's the bundling of the second visit, shown in the film, which led to them being caught.  He also decided that the public were all too aware of the back half of the Woodstein story and Nixon's resignation so he concentrated on writing about the parts people didn't know as well, essentially ending his film half way through the book at a moment of failure.  In that way he could show that you can't succeed unless you make a few mistakes along the way.  RIP.

Christian Marclay's The Clock.

Film Yesterday I fulfilled a decade long dream and finally saw a section of Christian Marclay's The Clock, which is currently on display at Tate Modern.  The supercut of supercuts, it's a twenty-four hour video piece in which the artist stitches together thousands of shots from movies featuring clocks which runs parallel to the actual time.  So if you're watching at about twenty past two in the afternoon, you can see Peter Parker being fired from his job in Sam Raimi's Spider-man 2 which gives way to shots of Fox Mulder in The X-Files under clock which tells a similar time.  It was first introduced to me on The Culture Show in 2010 when it was first released on the occasion of its premiere at the White Cube Gallery.

Judging by that piece, the presentation room is just as much a part of the installation as the film itself.  Just as back then, Tate Modern have created a luxurious screening space with pitch black walls and over a hundred IKEA Klippan sofa in white fabric (which I recognised almost immediately because we have one in our living room), just bright enough in the space so that you're able to find a seat without falling over, aided by an invigilator with a torch.  On entering I asked if there were any spaces at the front and on spotting half a sofa free up there I made my way over there and sat down, sharing the furniture with a slightly older man of which I can tell you very little else due to the darkness.

By that time it was about twenty to twelve, so I arrived just in time to see Robert Powell hanging from the hands of the Westminster Clock in The 39 Steps, of which extended clips are employed presumably because this is such an iconic shot of a time piece.  From that moment on I was enthralled.  There are plenty of illicit shots of the piece on YouTube shot with camera phones at weird angles, but none of them quite prepared me for the sheer range of movies and shots and how they intertwine and play off each other, music and sound effects drawing scenes featuring actors and settings originally recorded with decades between, mixing diverse sources, some VHS, mainly DVD, rarely respecting aspect ratio as to make the cuts between less jarring.

With the 2010 release and the artist's background and presumably access to sources, despite the number of films and television programmes included, there is nevertheless a certain limit to the sources.  Much of the material is from English language sources although there is some French material.  No, I did not see anything from Doctor Who, although my hope is that at midnight during the period which few viewers have seen, the TV Movie's millennium celebration is featured.  Plus it's necessarily populist.  There was an audible guffaw from the packed room when The Gold Watch sequence from Pulp Fiction emerged and was played almost entirely (it's still probably Tarantino's greatest work).

Something which had been of interest beforehand was how Marclay would deal with the moments when the history of film or at least the parts he research didn't deliver a particular time.  Often he simply extends the length of the clip.  But more often he takes the opportunity to include a time related moment which doesn't actually feature a clock, a character looks at their watch or there's some dialogue about time itself.  There are also shots from an earlier part of a scene which are intercut with other material which pay off later.  Or at is the case with Nick of Time we're offered a staccato version of the film as we keep returning to the action at key moments to check in on how the character is doing.

Later in the day, I added the film to my Letterboxd diary.  Usually I don't include anything which I haven't seen in its entirety, but since that's near impossible, I made an exception.  In the review section, there's an extended comment from someone who claims to have seen all twenty-four hours which I urge you to read.  As he notices that these short clips are merciless against the only ok actors in comparison to those who're able to communicate a character's whole being in just a few seconds.  He also notes how montage sequences in some films are edited so that they appear in real time, like the aforementioned pizza delivery scene in Spider-man which is reduced to the initial warning that he has to deliver them on time, then the late delivery and then later his firing.

My original plan was to spend the whole day in front of the film, but as the clips continued some interesting things started to happen.  After the first hour, my mind began to almost glaze as the clips began to topple onto one another as similar tricks by the artist were being repeated albeit with different footage from other films to the previous hour.  I've forgotten almost as many films included as I remember.  Plus I can't not admit to dozing slightly here and there, partly because the couch was so comfy.  I kept myself awake by guessing the film sources in my head and marveling at actually just how many of these films I'd seen.  Plus I felt quite happy about getting up now and then to go to the bathroom, even though I'd be missing something.

Which meant that after about three hours, I felt like I'd seen enough and left.  Although I've seen reports online of people watching this continuously for twelve hours, I don't think that's what the artist was expecting.  The piece is clearly constructed to be dipped in and out of for various stretches, the viewer visiting the venue at various points in the day and that's certainly how I would have approached The Clock had Tate Modern been more accessible to me.  With the show on until January 20th there would be plenty of time.  On my way out of the door, I indicated to the invigilator that three hours seemed like long enough (to which he agreed) and wondered if the piece, this copy of which is part owned by Tate might visit Liverpool.  Wouldn't that be ironic.

"the onslaught of content"

Film Evening. I've talked before about the onslaught of content and not having time for any of it. In the streaming world that's become especially acute especially in television terms with, across the BBC, Netflix, Now tv and Amazon about half a dozen excellent looking series I know I'd love premiering every week. The backlog is mounting up with both Iron Fist and Daredevil unwatched, countless series of Homeland, that new Julia Roberts thing, The Marvelous Mrs Maisel et al, etcetera, etc.

Of course I'd have plenty of time to binge those if I didn't watch as many films but again, there are so many films around now and since that is my primary form of entertainment/worship/education something has to give. I want to watch everything, but I can't watch everything, but ... oh my ... if I do that I won't touch the piles of unwatched books and magazines and how do I choose?

In a panic this week, I created an arbitrary list of rules to bounce any or all new film releases off, the kinds of stories I tend to like anyway as a way of limiting things, streamlining. Not necessarily a rule of thumb, just a way trying to sort between the films I want to watch and those I feel like should be watching. Writing it down or rather typing it into Word was a cathartic act even if I immediately felt a bit guilty.

Reviewed in Sight and Sound and so confirmed a theatrical release in the UK.

Sci-fi / Fantasy / Horror?

Musical?

Female lead?

Auteur director?

Weird?

Set in Paris?

Set in Tokyo?

Set in London?

Set in Liverpool?

Set in the United States, especially New York?

Actor I like?

Costume drama?

Courtroom drama?

Detective drama?

Oscar nominated?

Documentary about the visual arts?

Documentary about journalism?

Chinese/Korean/Japanese actioner?

Christmas?

Any Netflix films which are reviewed well in the streaming section of Empire Magazine, mentioned as one of Mark Kermode's Cream of the Streams or everyone seems to be watching.

God, looking at that again seems limited and limiting and bound to mean I'll miss something good. Not to mention that if I keep to this the cinemas of a large chunk of the world will go unwatched.  Clearly if there's a cinematic earthquake, I'll make room for it.  It's also true that I'm trying to return to my old rule of avoiding anything which has "harrowing portrayal" in the synopsis and that seems to describe much of the content released in the UK from some countries.

Perhaps it's the times in which we live but the motivating incident in a lot of films currently seems to be the death of a parent or wife or child, usually somewhere in the grip of great poverty and/or great social or religious oppression.  I'm already basically depressed with myself and the world.  I don't need to be watching films which will make me feel even worse, at least at the moment, at least not without an element of hope amid the wretched nihilism.

How do you choose the films you watch with so much available?  How conscious are you of your likes and dislikes and could you make a similar list?  How important do you feel it is to be across at least some new cinema versus "back catalogue"?  Are there some genres you simply can't stand?  I think the comments should be open, failing that use your social media channel to send me words?  I'm genuinely interested.